<<Beth to Jennifer>> You don’t have to like him to be my friend. As long as you like me, we’re cool.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> I want to like him.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> I shouldn’t have said that about Mitch making you unhappy. I love Mitch.

I’m sorry.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> No, it’s okay. You were right. Mitch does make me unhappy sometimes, and you don’t hold it against him.

Once upon a time at a family reunion …

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Okay. Well. I met Chris at the Student Union.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> You don’t say.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> We both used to study there between our 9:30 and 11:30 classes.

I had seen him on campus before. He was always wearing this yellow sweatshirt and giant headphones. The kind of headphones that say, “I may not take my clothes seriously. I may not have brushed or even washed my hair today. But I pronounce the word ‘music’ with a capital ‘M.’ Like God.”

Are you rolling your eyes yet?

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Are you kidding? I love love stories. Keep going.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> So I had noticed him before. He had Eddie Vedder hair. Ginger brown, tangly. He was too thin (much thinner than he is now), and there were permanent smudges under his eyes. Like he was too cool to eat or sleep.

I thought he was dreamy.

I called him Headphone Boy. I couldn’t believe my luck when I realized we studied in the Union at the same time.

Wel l , I studied. He would pull a paperback out of his pocket and read. Never a textbook.

Sometimes, he’d just sit there with his eyes closed, listening to music, his legs all jangly and loose. He gave me impure thoughts.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> You’re not stopping there! You can’t stop with “impure thoughts.”

<<Beth to Jennifer>> I have to. Pam just came over. One of the old movie theaters is closing. The Indian Hills. It’s got one of the last Cinerama screens left in the country. I can’t believe they want to close the place. (I’ve seen all four Star Wars movies there. I need to complete the series, damn it.)

Pam wants a story about it by morning. So, I’m actually on deadline. Like a real reporter. I got no time for love stories.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Okay, you’re excused. For now. But you’re finishing this story.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> I will, I promise.

CHAPTER 14

LINCOLN WAS NEVER going to send Jennifer Scribner-Snyder and Beth Fremont a warning.

He may as well admit that, to himself. He was never going to send them a warning. Because he liked them. Because he thought they were nice and smart and funny. Really funny—sometimes they made him laugh out loud at his desk. He liked how they teased each other and looked out for each other. He wished that he had a friend at work he could talk to like that.

Okay. So. That’s how it was going to be. He was never going to send them a warning.

Ergo. Therefore. Thus …He technically, ethically, had no reason to keep reading their e-mail.

Lincoln had told himself all along that it was okay to do this job (that it was okay to be a professional snoop and a lurker) as long as there was nothing voyeuristic about it. As long as he didn’t enjoy the snooping and lurking.

But now he was enjoying it. He found himself hoping that Beth and Jennifer’s messages would get picked up by the filter; he found himself smiling every time he saw their names in the WebFence folder. Sometimes, on slow nights, he’d read their messages twice.

It had even occurred to Lincoln once or twice that he could open up their personal folders and read any of their mail, anytime, if he really wanted to.

Not that he wanted to. Not that he ever would. That would be weird.

This was weird, he thought.

He should stop reading their messages. If he was never going to send them a warning, he should stop.

Okay, Lincoln said to himself, I’m stopping.

CHAPTER 15

From: Jennifer Scribner-Snyder

To: Beth Fremont

Sent: Tues, 09/07/1999 9:56 AM

Subject: Nice story.

And on the front page, even. You haven’t lost your chops.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Why, thank you. It was exciting working with the news editors again.

Everyone’s so intense over there. I felt like Lois Lane.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Normally, you feel like Roger Ebert, right?

Hey, guess who wrote your headline?

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Now that you mention it, it was a very clever headline. Pithy, even. It must have been Chuck.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Funny.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> We make a great team, you and I. We should join forces and …start a newspaper or something.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Mitch read your story at breakfast this morning, and he was p;ssed. He loves that theater. He saw The Goonies there six times. (His seventh-grade girlfriend had a crush on Corey Feldman.) He said that the Cinerama screen could make any movie look good.

<<Beth to Jennifer>>

1. Mitch had a seventh-grade girlfriend? Play on, player.

2. I hope he wasn’t implying that The Goonies was a bad movie. I love Martha Plimpton, and Corey Feldman was excellent. He never deserved to become a punch line. Did you see Stand By Me? The ’Burbs? The Fox and the Hound?

3. I love picturing you guys reading the paper together over breakfast. It’s so blissfully domestic.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Not this morning, it wasn’t.

I was reading the National page, and there was a story about a mother whose son tied her up because she wouldn’t buy him a PlayStation, and I said, “Jesus, one more reason not to have kids.” And Mitch snorted (really, he snorted) and said, “Are you writing these down somewhere? All the reasons we can’t have kids?”

I told him not to be mean, and he said, “You don’t be mean. I know that you’re not ready for a baby.

You don’t have to rub it in.”

“Rub it in to what?” I asked. “Are you wounded?”

Then he said that he was tired and that I should just forget it. “I love you,” he said, “I’m going to work.” I told him not to say it like that, like he had to say it to be excused from the table. And he asked if I would rather he left without saying “I love you.”

I said: “I’d rather you said ‘I love you’ because you were so full of love for me that you couldn’t keep it in. I would rather that you wouldn’t leave the house mad at me.”

And then he said that he wasn’t mad at me, that he was mad at the situation. The kid situation. Or, rather, the lack-of-kid situation.

But I am the lack-of-kid situation. So I said so. “You’re mad at me,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, “I’m mad at you. But I love you. And I have to go to work. Good-bye.”

Then I worried that he’d get into a car accident on his way to work, and I’d have to spend the rest of my life thinking about how I didn’t say, “I love you, too.”

I purposely didn’t take my folic acid pill after breakfast—to spite us both.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> When did you start taking folic acid?

<<Jennifer to Beth>> After my last pregnancy scare. It seemed like it would give me one less thing to worry about. Do you think I should call Mitch and apologize?

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Yes.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> But I don’t want to. He started it.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Maybe all of your pregnancy anxiety is starting to get to him.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> It is. I know it is. I don’t blame him. But I’m no good at apologizing. I always end up making it worse. I’ll say, “I’m sorry,” and I’ll be all sweet, and then once I’m forgiven, I’ll say, “But you really did start it.”

<<Beth to Jennifer>> That’s awful, don’t do that. That’s exactly what your mother would say.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> That’s exactly what my mother has said, to me, a million times.

I inherited it. I’m genetically programmed to be a terrible person.

Speaking of my mother, I foolishly told her last weekend that Mitch and I had been fighting about having a baby. And she sighed—have you heard her sigh? It’s like a balloon dying—and said, “That’s how it starts. You better watch yourself.”

“It,” of course, is divorce. Which she’s sure I inherited along with her straight teeth and her evil apologies. She’s just waiting. She keeps poking my marriage with a toothpick. Almost done!

So I was like “Really, Mom? It starts with fighting? And here I thought it started with my third- grade teacher.”

(Which, of course, is where her divorce started. Though one could argue that my parents’ divorce started the day of their shotgun wedding, that my father’s affair with Mrs. Grandy was more of a symptom than a disease.)

So, after that horrible, caustic remark, my mother and I were fighting, and I said more awful things, and she finally said, “You can say what you want, Jennifer, but we both know who’s going to pick up the pieces when this all falls apart.”

So I hung up on her, and Mitch—who had wandered into the room, but didn’t know what we were fighting about—said, “I wish you wouldn’t talk to her like that. She’s your mother.”

And I couldn’t tell him, “But she thinks you’re going to leave me, and she’s already taking your side in the divorce.” So I just frowned at him.

Then on Sunday, my mom called again, and it was like we had never argued. She wanted me to take her to the mall, and she insisted on buying me a red sweater at Sears, which I’ll probably end up paying for the next time she can’t make her Sears card payment.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Is that the sweater you’re wearing today? You got that at Sears? It’s really cute.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Don’t distract me. (Thank you. Isn’t it though?)

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Your mom’s a nut. Your marriage is nothing like hers. Your life is nothing like hers. She was already married and divorced with a 10-year-old by the time she was your age.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> I know, but my mother has a way of spinning those facts into a bad thing.

Her take is that I’m just a late bloomer—that I’m taking forever to ruin my life, and she’s running out of patience.

I remember getting past 18, the age she was when she had me, and thinking, “Whew, I did it. I made it to 19 without getting pregnant.” As if getting pregnant was even an issue. At 19, I hadn’t even kissed a guy yet.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Really? How old were you when you had your first kiss?

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Twenty. It’s pathetic. Guys don’t want to kiss fat girls.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Not true. There are all those guys on Jerry Springer, and there’s President Clinton …

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Make that: no one I ever wanted to kiss wanted to kiss a fat girl.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> I’ll bet you never gave anyone a chance. Mitch says you practically beat him away with a stick.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> I was trying to spare him.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> How did he win you over?

<<Jennifer to Beth>> He just wouldn’t leave me alone. He kept sitting behind me in our poetry- writing class and asking me if I had plans for lunch. Like I wanted this muscle-bound blond guy to watch me eat.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> I can just see him. A farm boy with sexy sousaphone shoulders …wearing one of those hats they give out free at the grain co-op and a pair of tight Wranglers. Do you remember those bumper stickers people used to have in college, “Girls go nuts for Wrangler butts”?

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Yes. And it’s the sort of memory that makes me wish I’d gone to college out of state. Someplace in Philadelphia. Or New Jersey.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> You know, if you had gone to school in New Jersey, you never would have met Mitch. You wouldn’t have taken a job here. You never would have met me.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Mitch says he was destined to meet me. He says I could go back and do my whole life over, and I’d still end up marrying him.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> See? He’s nothing like your dad. He’s wonderful. I wish you and I had been friends in college. Why weren’t we friends?

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Probably because I was fat.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> Don’t be stupid. Probably because I was too busy being Chris’s girlfriend to make friends.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> Probably because I was too busy working at the Daily. I never met any non- journalism majors until I started hanging out with Mitch’s marching-band friends.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> But I was a journalism major. That’s another thing I never did because I was so busy being in love: I never worked at the school newspaper.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> You didn’t miss anything, trust me. It was a viper pit. A drunken viper pit.

You know …here we are talking about college, I don’t have any stories to edit, you’re basking in the glow of a brilliant front-page scoop …

This would be a great time to complete The Romancing of Beth.

<<Beth to Jennifer>> It was more like The Romancing of Chris.

<<Jennifer to Beth>> The Romancing of Headphone Boy.

There he was, yellow sweatshirt, paperback. There you were, impure thoughts …